I'm only intermittently aware of the Green brothers, and had missed the podcast version of this, but them saw him doing the interview rounds, and thought it looked cool. The book is a series of essays on random items, concepts and events, each of which end up discussing the history of the topic and Green's relationship with it. They can be read alone, but are arrange in roughly in order so that each builds on the last to some extent. Topics include "The Human Sense of Wonder," "CNN," his favourite football goal tender's performance in a specific game, and "The Plague." The football player gets the most stars of any of the above.

As always, John Green's open about his anxiety, depression and constant search for meaning, winding each essay with quotes and references to other essays, trying to make his world coherent and connected. It feels a lot like how I think (less at least some of the anxiety), and I ended up resonating with this a lot more than I do with his fiction. I also enjoyed the utterly arbitrary nature of how he awarded stars to things, as a meta commentary on how the star rating system is for Amazon algorithms more than anything.

It's a very "I did this during C-19 lockdowns" project, which have been trickling out into the world over the past few years. I hope someone does a college class of how professional meaning-makers handled all that.